by bc woods

On the verge of tears, Lydia buried her face in her hands. "Oh my God...BC, you are so retarded." Several of the women behind her sobbed their agreement, by murmuring such words as "jackass," "dumbass," and "dork," but in a playful manner that said my story had been more than amusing.

Clearing my throat, I said, "Thank you," to the collected masses, which caused Lydia's abs to ache and her nostrils to tremble. While my almost crippling eccentricity barred me from having serious conversations, the discussions had allowed me to raise the absurd to an art form.

I had met Lydia several weeks ago, while taking my little sister to one of her soccer games. She was the mother of one of Karen's teammates, and we had had an instant rapport. I had a thing for what the great sage and philosopher John Hodgman refers to as SMILFs, and Lydia had a thing for idiot man-children with strong resemblances to computer animated green ogres. In other words, she had been divorced for six months and was trolling for anything that showed interest.

That summer it was a part of my weekly routine to take my little sister Karen to and from her soccer practices whenever I had a day off from working on the oil rig. That was fine except that Jacob had to come along, and if there's one thing a seven year-old American boy can't do, it's watch girls play soccer. Tearing my attention away from Lydia, Jacob tugged on my arm. "BC, I don't want to listen to stories anymore. I want to go play on the playground."

"Well just go on then, honey. Your big brother will be fine," Lydia laughed, taking hold of one of my arms. Despite the fact that she was twice my age, I felt stunningly normal with a woman holding onto my arm.

Jacob's large round eyes looked up at me, imploring. "But I wanted you to play with me." Politely shrugging Lydia off my arm, I knelt down on one knee before Jacob.

"Okay, Buddy," I said, ruffling his hair. He smiled. Lydia seemed somewhat upset that I would take off and leave her, but I didn't let it bother me. I had liked the normal feeling I had had when Lydia held my arm, but Karen and Jacob had always come first in my life, and they always would.

It often seems, that aside from the few poles of aluminum that make its frame, the hundred or so feet of steel chain that comprise its levers, and the half dozen rubber seats that support its loads, the largest component of any swing set is nostalgia. Swings are every bit as about sunshine, puffy clouds, and that one moment of weightlessness at the top of the arc when it seems like you could take off and fly forever, as they are about kinematics, dynamics, and gravitation. When one stares at a lone swing, one is forced to wonder at the last time they were truly as unbound as at the top of that self-propelled arc of childhood when forward and upward forces are held in perfect balance.

At a height of 6'2" and the ogreish weight of 230 lbs, my philosophical wonderings provided a perfectly acceptable reason to join my little brother on a swing set designed for small children when he asked me to, even if physics did not. Jacob smiled as I sat next to him...in a similar expression of emotion the swing set saw fit to creak. Though I was at my slimmest in years from the strenuous work of being on an oil rig for the past few months, the rubber beneath me stretched almost to the point of breaking, and the chains to either side of me dug tightly into my sides. Had my grandfather been alive to comment, he no doubt would have said I looked like "ten gallons of shit in a five gallon bucket."

When Jacob's small dimpled face looked over to me and laughed joyfully, I decided to ignore the warnings of the universe as promptly as I had decided to ignore Lydia's arm. In the first pump of my legs, my sense of rationality fell out of my back pocket and was lost in the wood chip floor. I would not find it again for some time.

It seemed for every swing I took, a year of maturity fell off the end of my life until soon I was a child again, lost in wonder, with eyes full of hope and a stomach full of butterflies. Side-by-side, child and ogre pumped their legs, and dreamed the dream of Icarus. If the swing set wobbled a bit every time I tossed my weight around, so be it. That was the concern of an adult, and had no place in my mind.

I was like a kid at Disneyland set free in a kingdom of magic. I was laughing with my little brother, and my laughter was wild and weightless. I looked at Jacob's big dimply face and said, "Hey! Buddy! Do you think I can make it over the top?" Time stopped.

Jacob dug both of his feet into the wood chips beneath him, mouth agape. His eyes opened wide in disbelief, and he said, "Can you really do that?" I have no excuse for what happened next but to say that I completely forgot that I couldn't. His eyes said, "You're my big brother, and you can do anything." Who was I to argue with that logic?

Stopping with both my feet, I looked around. There were about thirty or so kids on the playground, and about hundred or so kids and adults over at the soccer field. I looked my little brother right in his dimply face and said, "Yes, Buddy. Yes, I can."

As Jacob took off to tell the other children of the great feats about to unfold, I pumped as ogres are not meant pump. My thick lumber-like legs kicked in and out with a rhythm as perfect as it was furious. I was going to do it. I was going to do what MythBusters had only been able to do with several rockets, a steel rig, and a precision timer. I was going to swing my fat ass straight over the top. I was going to be a playground legend.

Jacob ran all over the playground, crying out, "MY BIG BROTHER IS GOING TO SWING OVER THE TOP!" Children near and far came to see what the mysterious "big kid" might be able to pull out of his hat. They lifted their little voices in cheers for "Shrek! Shrek! Shrek! Shrek! Shrek!" Somewhere beneath the fury of my pumps I made a note to never wear green sweatshirts again, or to cut my hair so short.

A sheen of sweat broke out on my face. I was almost even with the top bar. I was swinging on thin metal chains with all of my might. I had to do it. My little brother's honor was on the line. I put all of my might, every last ounce of effort I had into a swing more powerful than any I had ever before mustered. I kicked outward as though I was trying to leap to the moon in one thrust.

I had not thought that my might was so much greater than that of a thin metal chain.

At the end of the arc, under maximal centrifugal forces, a 6'2" 230lb ogre was only dimly aware of breaking contact with the support that had previously held him, and started to soar through the air in a majestic 12 foot parabola...into the middle of a throng of children. Behind him, a seat supported on only one side swung backwards and dragged itself to stillness on the ground.

Flying through the air, I was grateful to note that the children dispersed quickly. The chips below me fled even more quickly as they rushed out in a hail of dirt and wood in order to escape being crushed by my monster body. I landed with an inconspicuous thud. Everyone around me was suddenly filthy. I didn't care.

I couldn't breathe.

Laying face down on a bed of wood chips in the middle of a playground, having terrified a group of children that I landed in the middle of, and having thoroughly knocked the wind out of me, I found it doubly injurious when my little brother jumped on me, arms hugging tight, whimpering, "Please don't die, BC! Please don't die! I love you!"

Although I desperately wanted to hug my little brother, and tell him that everything was going to be all right, I really wanted to breathe first. I closed my eyes for about two minutes, trying to reorient myself to the world around me. Although the experience was ripe for life lessons, the first I learned was that I hated having the wind knocked out of me.

When I opened my eyes, I saw another surprise.

The SMILFs were standing above me.

Worse, Lydia was standing in front of them, and I was laying on the ground, completely humiliated in front of her. It would have been different if it were a war and I had just taken some kind of wound while battling the enemy, but this wasn't war. This was a playground. This was something the most vulnerable members of society played on for fun. And it had incontrovertibly kicked my ass.

Bending next to me, Lydia put her hands to either side of my face and felt for wounds. I felt dizzy. "Oh my God, BC, are you okay?"

I responded with a very heroic, "Uh... uh-huh." I would like to say my voice didn't have a puberty-esque squeak on that last syllable. I would like to. But it wouldn't be true.

"What happened?" asked another SMILF, trying to sort out the simultaneous explanations of thirty children.

"I was uh...I was uh..." I gulped, staring into Lydia's pale blue eyes, at the startling realization. There was no way out of this. Two SMILFs grabbed either of my arms and started to help me to my feet. I was covered with wood chips, dirt, and as I would find later that night, seven gum wrappers, three pieces of gum, and one half-eaten sucker. "I was uh...on the swing...and uh...."

"Oh my God, what were you doing!?! You're way too big to be on a swing like that!" Lydia asked incredulously. She had on a glorious SMILF coat, her hair was in a ponytail, and she was wearing tight spandex pants. I took one last regretful look, thought about how pretty she was, and realized that Lydia probably wasn't going to like me anymore, divorce or no.

I ran through every possible way to relate it to her in my head, but my ineptitude with interpersonal conversation tied my tongue in knots. My thoughts could not relate themselves into cohesive sentences. How could I say that I had looked into the eyes of a little boy, remembered my own childhood, and wanted to make that little boy's dreams come true? "I...ahem...that is to say I was trying to go over the top." The SMILFs looked at each other silently for a moment, like the calm before the storm.

I closed my eyes. My sense of rationality crawled back into my pocket, from where I had previously dropped it. Reality hit full on. I was a 6'2" 230lbs ogre, covered in wood chips, still trying to catch the rest of my breath, in the middle of a throng of SMILFs who were laughing their asses off at my expense. There were no good-natured insults this time, like when I had told the story earlier. Their laughter was too powerful for words. Lydia laughed loudest of all. I opened my eyes, looked down, and sighed deeply.

After just a few moments, the throng of SMILFs parted as my little sister came over to see what all the fuss was about. Even in their delirium the SMILFs watched her approach me.

Hands on her hips, dressed from head to toe in her soccer gear, she angrily demanded, "BC, what are you doing?"

"I fell off of a swing honey. Don't worry. I'll be all right." I mumbled.

I managed to smile a bit. At least Karen and Jacob weren't laughing. Karen and Jacob, my little angels, whose diapers I had changed, whose mouths I had fed, and whose bodies I had clothed. They understood me. Karen's arm cocked back. She threw her water bottle at me, the lid came off, and a bit of water splashed on the front of my chest. "Oh my God! You are EMBARRASSING me!"

The SMILFs fell to the ground, howling.

by bc woods

"No way, guys. I don't do drugs. You know that." My obstinance to substance abuse was well known in my high school, and likely the reason that Ryan and Andrew were so intent on breaking me. Surrounded by thousands of acres of forest, with a walk of at least five miles down a dirt road before my feet even found pavement again, the words seemed to lack resolution.

Andrew took the joint from Ryan and approached me, proffering the drug to me in a more reasonable manner. "We're way out here in the middle of nowhere, and I know you don't carry a cell phone. We're not going to drive you back into town if you don't take a puff." He pushed the joint toward me with an even greater resolve.

For every step he took forward, I took two backwards. His resolve was strong. Mine was stronger. "Nope. Not doing it. Sorry."

At this statement, Ryan lost all patience. "Jesus fucking Christ, BC! We're out in the middle of the goddamn woods. Just fucking take a puff, and we'll take you to the bookstore like you wanted us to." A little over fifteen minutes ago they had seen me walking toward the local Waldenbooks, offered me a ride, and then proceeded to drive me out into the middle of Wishkah on the pretense of a "quick chore."

To say that Wishkah is wilderness is an understatement. Relating that it has been, for the past fifty or so years, a hotbed of Bigfoot sightings puts one a little closer to the truth. Around me an army of trees too thick for three men to wrap their arms around all at once, soared up into the sky, blotting out the summer sun. It was not hard at all to imagine that one of man's primitive ancestors had managed to hide from civilization in those dark forests, and was still hiding there.

"Get off your high horse, BC!" Andrew shouted, making as if to throw the joint at me, and then as if realizing how much it cost, stopped mid-swing.

Putting both of my hands into my pockets, I sighed heavily. "Sorry guys, not doing it. I'm going home now." I turned my back to them and started my way back home.

My family history with substance abuse has been less than stellar. While the overwhelming majority of people can enjoy an evening of marijuana use and not go immediately insane, my family differs from the norm extraordinarily. For example, after going on his first real date with my mother, at the end of his six day marriage to her cousin, my father decided to procure a nickel bag of pot to celebrate the beginning of their relationship. After the two shared a few puffs together, my father became decidedly convinced that his mother was somewhere outside waiting to pounce upon the two of them and then promptly tried to drag my mother under the bed with him to hide. His reasoning, he explained, is that since she was always too lazy to look for him under his bed as a child, she surely would not be able to find him there as an adult. He still has no understanding of why he thought his mother was outside of his house in the first place, or exactly what she was going to do to him.

The stories continue from there, ranging from my mother claiming to be Jesus Christ when she was drunk, to the time Rachel got high on mushrooms and ran through the forests outside our home, screaming at the top of her lungs, convinced that all the twigs on the ground were snakes trying to eat her alive. No story of substance-induced psychosis, however, has anything on my uncle Arnie's.

In the early seventies, my very distant uncle Arnie, at the age of thirty-one, decided that the time had finally come. He was going to smoke marijuana. Exhausted at the monotony of his dull factory job, and deciding that--financial realities being what they were--he still needed a way to escape even if he couldn't quit as he longed to do, he finally settled on drugs. Taking a pass on all the harder drugs available at the time, to avoid the hazards of true addiction, he finally settled on the all natural, pure smelling, mellowing marijuana.

For the entirety of his life Uncle Arnie had been indistinguishable from the crowd. He crested every bell curve. His face, neither handsome nor ugly, had the sort of normalcy that makes one practically invisible. Neither stupid nor intelligent, charismatic or dull, Arnie lacked the sort of personal characteristics that set others apart from their fellow men. All that ended the first few days after he decided to smoke pot.

In the same way that a friendly doctor by the name of Jekyll once consumed a magical drink to become a gruesome fiend named Hyde, Uncle Arnie breathed in the fumes of a plant that made ordinary men silly and hungry, and went completely, raving mad.

Uncle Arnie could no longer even pretend to be mentally occupied at his factory job. He tossed restlessly at the assembly line, cursing under his breath. Occasionally, with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye, he would lean over to one of his coworkers and hiss, "It's time to make the streets safe again!" When his coworkers only stared at him in slack-jawed surprise, wondering what had happened to the unextraordinary man who had sat by them for the past ten years, he would dry wash his hands, murmuring about the need to "take back the streets." Exactly when the "streets" were lost or who they needed to be taken back from was a subject on which Uncle Arnie chose not to expound.

To fuel his newfound addiction, Uncle Arnie switched his role as a mere consumer of marijuana to a producer of it. To his wife's horror, their closets and bathrooms became home to a number of heat lamps and cannabis plants. No longer able to don a leisure suit and enjoy a night of disco, Arnie grew ever more estranged from his wife.

Concerned calls began to pass back and forth between relatives, wondering if Arnie had in fact, "lost it." A week, they reasoned, was too soon to go mad, and marijuana hardly drove people insane as the government at the time claimed it did. In a few weeks, they assured his wife, Arnie would go back to normal. All the while Arnie wandered around the house, a joint always slung low in the corner of his mouth, tending his cannabis plants like a Chinese master with his bonsai trees. As if to keep match with the plants, the concerns of the family began to grow.

On the dawn of a seemingly ordinary day, several weeks into his addiction, Uncle Arnie decided the time had finally come. He would do what none of the cowards at the factory had the courage to do. He was going to take the streets back.

With a can of white paint in one hand and a brush in the other, Uncle Arnie kneeled down next to his classic style station wagon and painted a simple white, five-pointed star on the driver's side door. The star symbolized his newfound office.

Later that day, wearing thick sunglasses, and sporting a plaid shirt, Uncle Arnie informed his boss at the factory that he quit. With the cool look of a man who has spit in the face of the Devil and lived to tell of it, Uncle Arnie told his boss, "There's a new sheriff in town," before kicking open the office door and getting back into his station wagon/cruiser. I can only imagine Arnie's boss, sitting behind his desk, blinking for a whole minute at the sheer enormity of what had transpired, asking everyone who walked past his door, "What the fuck just happened?"

Several times that day, Uncle Arnie could be seen driving up and down main street, hollering out of his window for cars to "pull over." For the most part he was met with honking horns and a shower of middle fingers. The few that actually complied were all friends of his, worried at his sudden change in behavior.

"Arnie...what the fuck are you doing out here? Aren't you on shift?" his friends would ask.

Brushing aside all questions, Arnie would simply ask, "Do you know how fast you were going, Sir?" while lowering his sunglasses to the tip of his nose.

"Are you high? How the hell are you going to pay rent if you're out here?"

Arnie would sniff contemptuously, raising an eyebrow. "Sure you were, pal, sure you were. Can I see your license and registration?"

"I'm calling your wife."

"Looks like I'm going to have to write you a ticket. Sorry you couldn't do this the easy way." Pulling a pad of white objects and a pen from his back pocket, Arnie then used the top of his detainee's car as a writing surface. Then, shoving a white cloth-like substance into their hands, Arnie tipped the brim of his imaginary trooper's hat and said, "Just keep it under 30 next time, pal."

I imagine his detainees were always startled to find that the ticket they had been given was in fact a napkin, scribbled on one side with a various number of stars, crescent moons, and comets, and a red lemon-shaped Dairy Queen symbol on the other.

The family, of course, was called in the end. Several of my other uncles had to show up and restrain Arnie from causing any more harm. Fighting all the way, he was eventually forced into the back of his own car and driven home. His heat lamps and marijuana plants were destroyed, and while this caused him to mellow, he never really became sane again. His job was lost to him forever, and in the matter of a few months his wife had left him too. At all these things, Arnie could only wrap his arms around his legs, bury his head into his knees, and sob inconsolably about what a damn shame it was for an officer like him to be taken off "the force."

No one really sees Arnie anymore, except maybe at a wedding or a funeral. He tends to sit alone in corners, looking suspiciously at passersby, putting napkins into his pockets when no one is looking, no doubt dreaming of his glory days on patrol.

As I made my way home through the forest, I tolled out the thousand relatives of mine who had found their drug of choice and gone mad with it. I could only imagine what would happen to me if I did the same. Given my obsession with superheroes, I don't think I would be so far off from Uncle Arnie. With my thousand eccentricities amplified, and my social inhibitions removed, I can only wonder at what I would become.

I can only surmise that I would put on a Superman t-shirt, decide I was, in fact, Kryptonian, and then attempt to listen in on police scanners to foil crimes with my superpowers. Instead of writing tickets, I would no doubt fall back upon superhero puns. Perhaps, after throwing a jaywalker into a fountain, I might even laugh, "Looks like you're all washed up," before swishing a red sheet around my shoulders and pretending to fly away. It might be a fun couple of hours before I was dragged away in a straight-jacket and thrown into solitary confinement.

By the time I finally got home it was fully dark, and I had walked ten miles. I collapsed, exhausted, into my bed and fell asleep. The next morning I awoke sore, but still relatively sane, all thanks to Uncle Arnie...the man who taught me that no matter how mild the effects of it might be on a normal person, it would most surely drive me mad.

by bc woods

"Come on, BC, time to go." Dressed in dirty jeans, a ripped t-shirt, and old work boots, my father was the antithesis of relaxation. In fact, he looked like the incarnation of hard physical labor.

Defiantly turning the television back on with the remote control, I said, "I don't have to be anywhere today." Emphasizing this point, I gulped a disgusting amount of grape soda and stared insolently.

"We're going to pull weeds at the saw mill to raise money for your senior class party."

Agitated that I was going to miss a morning of made-for-television movies, and growing suspicious that all I was going to do was pull weeds, I grunted, "The kids don't raise money for the party." It was a tradition unbroken for decades.

"Nope, everyone is going to be there, kids too. Dude's coming." A mental image of my childhood friend Dude, bent over in a dirt patch pulling weeds out of the ground, settled in my mind about as comfortably as an image of me in a loving stable relationship with a beautiful woman. It was a scientific impossibility.

"Dude's coming? Now I know you're lying." Back when we were seven or eight, Dude had briefly thought about working, but then had decided the effort was too much trouble.

"BC, don't be a pussy." My father stared at me like an experienced hostage negotiator, waiting for what my next move would say about me in his grand strategy.

I put my hands to my face and groaned. I looked at the ceiling and asked myself, "When will I learn?" I slammed the mason jar on a nearby coffee table, transformed my recliner back into a seat with the efficiency of Optimus Prime, stood up and muttered, "God I fucking hate you." Shuffling to the door, and pulling my shoes onto my feet with as much visible effort as I could muster, I called out, "Did you put the rakes in the back of the truck yet?"

"Not yet."

Under my breath I said something which sounded suspiciously like "cock-sucker" but which my father correctly interpreted to mean that I would get the tools from the garage and put them into the truck. As soon as I got outside, I realized I was still wearing pajama pants and went back inside to change.

The clock turning nine just shortly after we arrived, I saw Dude's mother already in the mill parking lot. Dude was nowhere to be seen. Shaking my head, I opened up the truck door and got out. "Dude's not coming, is he?" I asked.

Dude's mother shook her head perplexedly. "Of course not... parents always raise the money for the senior all-night party." I was not surprised.

Grabbing a shovel and a rake from the back of the truck, I said, "Not this year."

"Okay guys, let's get to it. The other parent volunteers aren't showing up till eleven." Since focusing his will on making life simpler would make too much sense, my father often likes to go out of his way to make tasks more difficult. This generally includes refusing to use cheaper, more modern, methods of doing work and ignoring brief instructions aimed at eliminating trial and error. Sometimes this includes a simple refusal to work the same paltry amount of hours as everyone else. Once when I was a child buying shingles with him for a roof we were going to put on, I stumbled across an invention in the warehouse called a Hurricane Bar. A Hurricane Bar, designed to remove old roofs in a fraction of the time it took to tear them off with a flat-bladed shovel, cost approximately twenty dollars. When I brought this marvelous invention to my father and told him about all the man hours we could save on our upcoming job, and how this simple piece of metal could save us thousands of dollars in the course of years, he cordially invited me to check and see if perhaps my little boy pussy wasn't bleeding all over the place. An hour later I had found myself on a wooden shingle roof, choking on old dust, using a regular flat blade shovel as a pry bar.

Due in part to decades of neglect, several chemicals from the wood planer no one really likes to talk about, and the general evil of my hometown Aberdeen, the weeds outside the mill had been hideously transformed into small, stalwart trees. While my plan to uproot these weeds had previously been to dig around them in a circle and then pry them over with a shovel, my father soon challenged the masculinity of this task. In a matter of a few minutes, I found myself squatting down, bear-hugging weeds the size of mutated hobbits, and then pulling upwards with every tendon on my spine with the fury of Conan. To keep pace, my father worked on a row of weeds directly across from me, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, and encouraged me not to be a "little fucking girl."

Drenched in sweat, and pulling weeds out of the ground like we were warriors from Middle-Earth hell-bent on destroying an evil species of Ent, my father and I made a wonderful impression on the parents who arrived some two hours later. Calling out "watch it, buddy" to the vice principal standing behind me, I threw another tree-like weed high into the air so it landed on a pile behind me.

"Um... Mr. Woods?" My father grunted in acknowledgement, his eyes locked on mine like a bull on a matador. My eyes took in his fury and dared him to bring on more. Neither of us could be compelled to stop pulling.

Standing at a safe distance, watching my father and I pull, grunt and scream, the vice principal said, "Well... umm... the parents volunteers and I are here to pitch in." The vice principal smiled expectantly. Pushing forward with my all, I wrapped my bear hands around the spines of two weeds and pulled. Having reached the end of a small garden section, though there were many sections left to work on, my father was forced to admit defeat.

"Fuck!" my dad kicked a loose bit of shrubbery, in defeat. Unable to see the suddenly frightened look on the face of the vice principal my father continued, "Yeah, okay we'll go talk to Tammy in the front office. She'll check you guys in." As I had predicted, Dale Trevin's mother had come, as had Zach Mervin's and roughly six or seven others... but not their children. I was the only senior who was going to contribute to the senior all-night party. Leaving the weeds up front, my father announced our new agenda.

"Come on everybody, there's a bunch of goddamn thorn bushes by the log ramp."

"Oh my!" said Mrs. Trevin. "I don't know if I dressed appropriately for thorn bushes." These pleas were directed to my father, who in the fashion of a true leader of men, was already in the front office grabbing hard hats for everyone.

Handing out what looked like half-skulls made from hard yellow plastic, my father told everyone what they needed to know to be safe on the mill grounds. "Okay everybody, we're going to go ahead and skip the regular safety talk since we don't have much time." Several people confessed that they did, in fact, have plenty of time, so my father decided to allay their fears with a brief safety chat. "Just don't stand in front of a forklift or nothin' dumb like that, and you'll be fine." Several questions about falling loads or restricted areas were met with the command to "just follow me."

As the weeds in front of the mill had been mutated by time, chemicals, and the mysterious force of small backwater town evil, so too had the thorn bushes. The thorn-forest under the log ramp extended fifteen feet from the river that bordered the mill, and ran the course of nearly a quarter mile along the riverbed. The thorns themselves were nearly half an inch long and gleamed like polished steel.

"Okay, Mr. Woods," said the vice principal trying to put on a reassuring smile that barely hid his total fear, "if you could just show us where we could find some weed whackers we'd be happy to get started on this job."

"Ah hell, you don't need a weed whacker, just watch." Bending down low, and crawling into the vines of twisting knives like a soldier under barbed wire, my father grabbed a bush by its roots. His hand dribbled with blood as he pulled it free from the earth. "See?" he held it high for all to see. Mrs. Trevin gulped.

After several failed attempts to do what my father had done, in which the parents cautiously approached a given branch, tugged on it, and drew back their hand in pain, my father finally conceded that they could all wear gloves. After the gloves were awarded, I calculated that given the depth and length of the thorn bush patch, it would take a mere month and a half for our crew to completely clear out the brush, were we to work eight hours a day, seven days a week.

At times, lost in a forest of sharp branches, smelling only the stench of my own sweat, I could almost swear I heard Mrs. Trevin crying softly in a nearby patch. However, I could not be certain since the thundering of my heart tended to drown out all other sound. Once, I think someone let a branch snap backward without meaning to, and it decapitated the person behind them... or I could just be imagining things.

As the sun approached noon, Mrs. Trevin finally went mad. Covered with dirt, grime, and several of the aforementioned planer chemicals, Mrs. Trevin looked at her watch and began to jump up and down like a cartoon ape with a banana. "It's 12:30!" she cried out. "It's 12:30!" Laughing as though she had snapped under heavy torture, she shook her bleeding arms high in the air above her. "12:30 is lunchtime, I have to go. Don't you see? I have to go. It's lunchtime, and I have errands to run for the rest of the day. I couldn't possibly stay. Nope. I have to go. It's lunchtime." She looked at all the parents, smiling too widely, with irises bordered by an endless ocean of white.

Not bothering to say anything, my father harrumphed contemptuously in the bushes.

I put my arm around Dale's mother. "It's okay now, Mrs. Trevin... he can't hurt you anymore."

"You just see... it's 12:30. I have to go. It's 12:30." Like the Angel of Death, I led her out of the mill, through the front gates, and told her to step into the welcoming light that was her neon red Ford Taurus.

The parents back at the work site had fallen into a state of depression shared only by victims of the Holocaust, or the slaves of ancient Egypt. "I don't know Mr. Woods... there sure is a lot of stuff to clear here... I've got a family to get back to."

"Well, we'll just have to come back for another weekend then," my father offered.

"Oh jeez... I don't know if I can do that, my wife and I have plans to go to the beach next weekend."

"Well, I just think it would be a damn shame if these kids didn't have their party." My father was so good at lying none of the other parents realized it. The charity event wasn't about the party. It was about my father showing all of the assembled volunteers that he was stronger than they were.

For another two hours, the parent volunteers held out, until physical exhaustion finally set in. "Listen, Mr. Woods...your dedication is great and all but we didn't sign up for this. We just wanted to wash cars or something like that. We have to go." They trudged off into the distance like zombies.

It was seven in the evening before my father and I followed suit. We were covered in dirt from head to toe, our legs and arms trembled from the exertion, and we found it hard to focus enough to speak. "How many more weekends you reckon we're going to be doing this, Dad?" I asked.

"About three, I figure." I nodded, knowing that by my father's figuring three meant at least five.

"You know the others aren't coming back, right?" My father grunted his acknowledgement.

We were in the car before I thought to ask the most important question. "How much are they paying you for this anyway? Six grand?" The number was a bit high, but I figured the mill was willing to pitch it in, since it was a charity event and all.

"Five hundred dollars," my father mumbled.

I chuckled, too tired to do anything but be amused at my father. "So, after they get about one hundred and fifty man hours out of us and those parents, we're going to get five-hundred dollars?" I whistled out the window. Say what you will, but my father is one-of-a-kind.

Two months later, when the mill decided they didn't particularly feel like spending money on a weed killer, no one could have ever told that we had been there.

by bc woods

"And you're not comfortable!" Karen complained, throwing an elbow into my stomach.

"Well, I'm sorry, but there aren't enough seats for everyone." Inside the auditorium where my brother's graduation ceremony was to take place, I was drowning in a sea of white trash. To my immediate rear, a woman with large purple plastic rectangular earrings wore sweatpants and a t-shirt. Every now and again she would push the gum in her mouth into a pocket on her tongue and blow a bubble until it popped. A young man of no more than eighteen sat in front of me, with a child on his lap. At first I had thought, like me, it might be his younger sibling, but at a graduation like this it was more likely it was his own spawn.

"Jacob got his own seat," Karen rebutted, staring at our youngest brother. He was sitting glumly in his oversized auditorium seat with his chin resting firmly in the palms of both his hands. His expression was one of a child staring out a window at a rainy-day playground.

"Well you two will just have to take turns, we didn't save enough seats for everyone."

Before she could complain again, a woman in a business suit took the microphone on stage. "Again everyone, we are not able to start the graduation until the walkways are clear of people. It's by order of the fire marshal." All around me the crowd rose up in protest, as people continued to crawl through the cramped aisles in hopes of finding an open seat.

"Unless the fire marshal has a retarded child, I'm guessing he won't be here to see," I muttered.

"What?" Karen interjected.

"Nothing, honey. She just said that if everyone sits down, Bryan can finally come out on stage." I hoped that it wouldn't take too terribly long to graduate fifty people.

"I don't want to talk about it, Mom."

"You have to admit it though...with those glasses."

I closed my eyes, and turned still further away from her. "Be quiet, please," I begged.

"...and you've put on a little weight," my mother added eagerly.

"Just stop right there, Mom. I'm not going to fight with you in the middle of a graduation ceremony."

"I can't help it! You do!"

Tired of listening to her, I put my hands over Karen's ears. "No, I don't. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for even thinking something like that. That's sick."

In rebuttal, my mother slapped our nearest relative on the arm, and whispered, "Be honest, doesn't BC look like a pedophile in those glasses?" My relative stared at my mother wide-eyed in shock. My mother took this as a sign of total agreement. I bit my tongue before it could get away from me. Whenever she thought I was feeling too good about myself, or was too happy, my mother liked to use whatever means necessary to bring me back down.

Laughing cheerily, my mother wrapped her arm around my shoulder. "Oh come on, BC. Don't be angry. You do. You can't blame me for seeing what's there."

Looking flatly into her eyes, my mouth trembling in anger, I mouthed, "I hate you."

In response, my mother laughed, squeezed her arm tightly around my head, and kissed me on the cheek. I felt like I had been raped. "BC, you big dork! Of course you love me. I'm your mother!" She tilted her head back and cackled like a witch. "I'm so happy to have all of my children here, together." I craned my head back, looked at the ceiling, and prayed to God that a skylight would fall down and decapitate me. After a moment, I decided that there was no God, took out my iPod, and turned on some music like a morphine drip. Although I could no longer hear her, my mother continued to talk.

For another ten minutes, as Karen elbowed me in the ribs for the crime of not being made of goose down, and as my mother continued to spew what I assumed were insults about my physical appearance, the people standing in the aisles took their seats. The woman in the business suit took the stage again, only this time she handed the microphone to someone else. The graduation ceremony was finally starting. I breathed a sigh of relief.

The administrator of schools, Martin Michaels, said, "May I now introduce, the graduating class of 2007!" in a timid voice, that I knew from my own graduation was the loudest sound his tiny lungs were capable of producing. A stream of students poured through the back door. "Bryan!" Karen shouted.

I waved at my brother, as the rest of my family contented themselves with screaming his name at the top of their lungs. Bryan rolled his eyes, shook his head, then put his face into his hands and sighed.

After I had written three personal experience essays for him, completed several credits of science and English in online courses, and made an adventure poster about his life, my brother was finally graduating. His friend Zane was also graduating due to my help. I had charged Zane $50 for completing half a science credit. And here I had thought that my knowledge of all the levels of the atmosphere would never come in handy.

After my brother and his friend took their seats on stage, followed by several girls with mysterious bumps under their gowns, the woman in the business suit again took the stage. A few announcements were made about students who had received awards, before the microphone was again turned over to Martin Michaels. "Cross your fingers, Karen," I whispered.

"Why?" she whispered.

"Because I think he's going to tell the John Anderson story, and it takes forever. We have to do everything we can to stop it." After getting Karen and Jacob to cross each pair of fingers on each of their hands, I joined in. Twelve superstitious symbols were all that stood in the way of Marty Michaels and twenty minutes of absolute boredom.

"Now I know you all didn't come here to listen to some school administrator make some long and boring speech..."

"Thank God for that."

"...but there's just one story I'd like to share with all of you tonight."

I suppressed the need to scream "fuck" as loudly as I could.

"I'll admit I've made a lot of mistakes in my career working with children. Sometimes I've been prone to judge people by their past performance. Well, boy howdy do I have a story to tell you about that." Marty Michael's voice is permanently leveled at the exact pitch and volume between "I give up on hearing this" and "barely audible," in a place I like to call, "The eternal hunt for intelligible sound." Due to the strange quality of his quavering speech patterns he becomes impossible to tune out.

"John P. Anderson was the kind of student a vice principal gets to know very well in the course of the school year." Marty paused for laughter, but was greeted with a few hundred facial expressions that showed no more excitement than they would if they were watching grass grow. Having heard him recite this story no less than five times in the course of my education at Aberdeen schools, and with the same reaction, I could scarcely believe he still bothered to wait for laughter.

After a longer than necessary description of John P. Anderson's indiscretions, Marty took the story where I had heard him take it so many times before. "Well, it so happened there was another student at that school named 'John T. Anderson.' These two boys couldn't have been more different. John T. Anderson was an all-American athlete, on the honor roll, very involved in school committees." Emphasizing the disparity in characters between "John T. Anderson" and "John P. Anderson" as strongly as he emphasized their middle initials, for no less than three solid minutes, Marty was finally satisfied that we understood the two men were not the same person.

"Brandon, I'm bored," Karen whined.

Scratching her head sympathetically, I whispered, "I know, honey. I'm sorry."

Marty suddenly said, "Instead of John T. Anderson, the secretary heard John P. Anderson," which I knew now meant the introduction of the characters was over, and the story was finally beginning.

I decided to amend my apology to Karen. "I'm so, so sorry, honey."

Rather than introducing the main thrust of the story with a few well-rehearsed lines that would have let the humor of the situation hit all at once, Marty chose to drag on the scenario for whole paragraphs, letting all humor that might have been in the story die a slow painful death. "Well you see, there was a conference every summer we could send children with leadership potential to. Every year we were allowed to send ten students. That weekend all the kids showed up to get on the bus, and there comes not John T. Anderson, but John P. Anderson, not with a suitcase, but with a garbage sack full of clothes."

"Never saw it coming," I said to no one in particular.

"Well you can bet how I felt about that." Marty put both his hands on his hips and huffed in mock exasperation. Several people blinked at him. It was the strongest reaction he had yet received. "I was worried about my career. I was worried about him damaging the school. I was worried about him assaulting other students at the conference. I was just worried silly, to be honest." From a person with the ability to use inflection to convey emotion the words might actually have resonated.

"I got a call that weekend, and boy howdy was I worried. I said, 'Let me stop you right there. Whatever he did, we'll pay for it. If he hurt someone or cut someone, just send us the bill.' " Marty again paused for the audience reaction. I believe someone in the back row may have popped their jaw while yawning.

"Well the man on the phone, if you can believe this..." even at its lowest setting in the stand, the microphone looked twice as thick and ten times as ferocious as Marty. "...the gentleman on the other end of the line had called to tell me that John P. Anderson had been elected 'Best Potential Leader' by all the students at the conference. Which just goes to show you... that you can't judge a book by its cover." Unaccustomed to the prolonged silence at the microphone, several people awoke from pleasant naps to see Marty Michaels expecting a thunderous applause that never came. After a few more uncomfortable silent moments, Marty finally gave control of the microphone to someone else, an expression of complete defeat on his unimpressive brows.

Karen slept peacefully against my chest. Jacob was nestled against the armrest nearest my elbow. "Wake up guys, he's gone now." I smiled at the stage. It looked like they were about to read names.

"Here at this school, we like to stress the importance of the individual. So, the students are going to be introduced by their advisors," announced the lady in the business suit. I now understood that she was the principal of my brother's remedial high school.

I had assumed that each teacher would call out the names of their students, and then hand them their diploma. I was wrong. Included with each student's name, was a brief three minute biography. Multiplying that value by fifty meant that it was going to take over two-and-a-half hours to graduate the entire class.

Their biographies were like insane Ad-Lib games using the same template. "Billy is a good boy, although we all know he's had his fair share of trouble... Robert's mother left when he was six, uprooting his moral center... so it was no surprise when Beth had her first child at the age of fifteen... Bobby excels in our welding courses, and has earned the respect of his peers... but Raylene has come through it all and now has a job at the local Wal-Mart... we wish him all the best." While the rest of the audience applauded, I found myself wishing for some kind of tranquilizer gun that could shoot birth control.

Most disheartening was the adviser who was charged with all the pregnant girls in the high school. Comprising over two-thirds of all the female student body, her group was by far the largest of graduating students. One girl, partially retarded, was loudly applauded when it was announced that she was "the proud mother of three." I figured that based upon their gender, the world had just had some combination of three strippers and criminals added to its population. Under the sound of the applause, I turned my little sister to face me.

"Don't listen to this applause Karen. Those are bad girls up there. Bad girls. Don't be like them." I shook my finger for emphasis. While recognizing that sometimes perfectly good people become pregnant at young ages, I did not feel it was necessary to share this belief with my sister. She looked incredibly confused.

"What are you talking about, BC?"

"Just please don't have kids until you're thirty, honey," I begged.

"You're weird."

Upon hearing the adviser announce that, through bureaucratic oversight, "Rebecca actually doesn't have any children," I applauded as loudly as I could, until my palms felt like they were about to bruise. I even emitted a few "whoos" and cries of, "You go, girl!" until I realized that no one else was cheering, and several people were staring at me. Rebecca seemed to be rather appreciative.

"BC, what are you doing?" my mother whispered, incredulously.

"Being the applause of reason," I replied, figuring if my mother was incredulous and offended by my applause, that I had to be on the right track in terms of morality.

"You're so judgmental," she sneered.

Mouthing, "I hate you" one more time, I applauded ferociously when Bryan's adviser took the stage.

Distracted by the sudden sight of my brother, as usual my mother provided an insightful comment to wrap up the moment, "Oh my God, Bryan is sooo tall." I ignored her, and pointed at the stage, for Karen and Jacob to see.

"Do you see, guys? Do you see Bryan?" The children clapped furiously.

Bryan stood on stage, his full height only made taller by his black gown looming over the other students. His arms were crossed, and he had an aura that carried the distinct impression of annoyance as his biography was being read. Of all the students who graduated that day, he was the only one to be visibly muttering beneath his breath.

As he had explained to me earlier in the day, he wondered why he even had to go. "I don't see what all this fuss is about. It's not even like I graduated from a real school."

by bc woods

Like myself, my uncle Doug was occupied with filling out his own notes: only it was in ticket form. Having never received a ticket in my life, I could scarcely believe how long it took to fill one out. If I were a cop, no one would ever be arrested. There was just too much paperwork.

At 10:34 that night my uncle Doug had pulled up in front of my house with the promise of taking me on patrol with him to help me to procure a few good stories. Armed with a notepad and a pencil, I drove with him to the police station. At 11:11, after receiving a brief instruction on what to do if he was shot or incapacitated (one of which involved an awesome half-joking scenario of me getting to use the passenger side door as a shield and fire an M-16), we finally hit the streets.

While we had pulled over several other vehicles, the Ginger Bread Man was our first actual arrest of the night. He had started to weep almost as soon as my uncle Doug had handcuffed him and thrown him in the back of the car. Blubbering loudly, as both I and my uncle Doug attempted to fill out our mutual types of paperwork, the Ginger Bread Man asked, "Am I gonna go to jail, Officer?"

Rolling his eyes, my uncle Doug answered with his own question, "Would you like to?" At that, the Ginger Bread Man shut his mouth and chose a wiser course of action by sobbing silently with his head against the window. Although the ticket was just for driving with a suspended license, it took my uncle Doug a good twenty minutes to do all the field paperwork necessary to process the Ginger Bread Man and release him. There being no real reason to take him to jail, my uncle assured me it was less of an inconvenience to just let him go. After allowing the Ginger Bread Man to wander off alone into the night, my uncle Doug sighed regretfully. "Good, now he's despondent, and he'll go home and kill himself. Then I'll have to take care of that goddamn mess."

"How long does it take to do all the paperwork, when you go back to the station?" Due to budget cuts, my uncle Doug's police station is actually a trailer that employs five officers and only has one patrol car with 147,000 miles on it. After he told me that when he got back to the station it would likely take him a half an hour to fill out the incident report just on the Ginger Bread Man alone, I wondered how much of the department's budget went toward purchasing paper.

"So you're going to write a story about this, huh?"

"If something interesting enough happens, I will. In either case, it beats staying at home without a computer."

"They're fucking hilarious, you know."

I laughed at the compliment, glad that someone in my family enjoyed my work. "Yeah, my mom doesn't really think so. Did you hear about her disowning me for five weeks?"

"Yeah, that was pretty funny too." It had been pretty funny. Especially when she thought I was going to care.

"You know people are afraid to talk in front of me now?" Earlier that week, I had walked up on a group of my relatives chatting in a circle at my brother's graduation. They had all gone stone silent upon realizing I was near. Imagine, all it took for them to be quiet was someone telling their secrets to tens of thousands of people.

Despite the general social awkwardness that made me a good writer, I have never had a problem telling a story as well as writing one. For a solid two hours we made no arrests as I recounted various experiences to my uncle Doug from my summer in the oil fields. Eventually, parked under the harsh yellow sodium glare of street lights, I recalled the time an obese woman had fisted herself in an unsuccessful attempt to get me to put my penis in her octopus textured vagina. Ending the story the same way I do every time I tell it, I said, "And I'd tell you what it smelled like too... except you'd never be able to eat tuna fish again."

Grimacing and fighting a gag as though someone had shit on his upper lip, my uncle Doug muttered, "Fuck BC... that was just awful."

I nodded, satisfied at the strength of the emotional reaction. The strength of that story when I tell it almost made it worth living.

Just then, a lipstick red car peeled out from a nearby gas station, and made a fast u-turn in the middle of the street. The flashers were on before she even had a chance to complete the turn. In the same instant, my uncle Doug recited her license plate number to the dispatcher to get an officer safety check. Upon hearing the "all clear," my uncle Doug leapt out of the car with the speed of a pouncing cat.

Sitting in the car, as I had been told to do at the start of the trip, I took copious notes. Our latest suspect was a giant Native American woman. Weighing easily as much as myself, and with the same frame, she looked as though she had been shoved into the car with a titanium pry bar. Although she had my build, she lacked the giant friendly features of an animated ogre. Instead, her small button-like black eyes were surrounded by an immense halo of tear-scattered mascara, and her mouth hung open on the loose hinge of her jaw like a door in a busted frame. Drunkenly, she pleaded, "I was jusht two blocks away offsher! Jusht two blocksh!" Although not tiny, my uncle looked absurdly small next to the troll he was forced to handcuff. I was surprised when he managed to make the metal loops latch around her wrists.

When she was placed in the seat behind me, the patrol car noticeably slumped to the right, and the liquid in a nearby Big Gulp cup slanted at its surface to show the sudden inequality in height to either side of the car. My uncle Doug crooked a finger to signal that it was okay for me to come out of the car. Although I am by no means a slim man, the car barely jumped at my departure. I guess she weighed more than me after all. A lot more.

"Christ... that's a big woman," I said, rubbing my eyes partly because it was so late, but mostly because it was so hard to look directly at something so ugly. She had pressed her face against the backseat window and was staring at us with her two large raccoon eyes, pleading with us for freedom. I looked at my uncle Doug. He was counting beer cans in her car. There were seven, and all looked to be freshly empty. "How drunk was she?"

"She blew a 0.17."

"Isn't that death?" My uncle rolled his eyes at me. "Well, excuse me. You know I don't drink."

"Still, you should know more than to think twice the legal limit causes death. Well, for your information 0.15 is still very drunk. Did you see me give her the field sobriety tests? She almost fell down twice."

I hung my head. "Uh... I guess I was taking notes?"

A search of Tina Troll's vehicle revealed three fully packed garbage sacks, a backseat full of sweatpants, and one marijuana pipe. "What do we do now?" I asked.

"First we call a tow truck, then we take her to county lockup."

"What? No holding cell in the trailer?" Adjusting his utility belt to more easily place his flashlight back in his belt, my uncle Doug jerked his head back toward the car.

"Just get in the car, prick."

When my uncle Doug joined me, I was astounded at the number of forms which had to be filled out. First, he had to complete a page and a half inventory on the contents of her car, until he became so exhausted he eventually just wrote "Garbage" under the section for contents. Secondly, he had to write an actual ticket which took half an hour. Finally, after reading Tina Troll her Miranda rights, and getting her to sign a sheet that affirmed she had been apprised of her rights, we were finally done with all the paperwork that had to be filled out at the scene of the arrest.

Leaving her car to be towed later, we made our way to the county jailhouse. Performing a quick mental calculation, I asked, "So hold on... in field work alone, does it take four hours every time you take someone into custody?" My uncle Doug nodded. "And it's another two hours back at the station to fill out the incident report?" Tina Troll was only semi-conscious in the backseat. I looked back at her, appraised her worth as a member of society vs. six hours of someone's time, and asked, "Why don't you just shoot them and hide the bodies?"

"Democrats." I made sure to scribble the response into my notepad.

"Was that one just for me?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

The trip to county lockup was bizarre for a number of reasons. My uncle Doug pulled up to a speaker not unlike those used in fast food restaurants and announced that he had a prisoner for lockup.

"What's the matter? Wasn't enough money left over from the trailer rent for you to make a phone call?" the scratchy voice responded.

"Just open the garage, guys," my uncle Doug responded.

"Procedure says we need to wait thirty minutes for unannounced prisoners."

"Just open the garage, guys." Down a small incline in front of us, a wall that strongly resembled an armored garage door retracted into the ceiling. Driving through the door landed us in a twenty foot long, single parking spot. The door closed behind us on silent a silent electric motor. Even though I was in the front of the car, rather than the back, I had the distinct feeling of confinement.

The doors into the prison itself were constructed like hatches in a submarine. The first door was about six inches of solid steel, which led into a small compartment. When my uncle Doug man-handled Tina Troll into the small compartment he closed the thick steel door behind him. Only then did the set of bars in front of us slide open. It was a perfect seal getting in and out of the prison. The exit was never completely unobstructed.

Unable to stand unaided, Tina Troll asked if she could sit down. When told she could, she kept asking at increasingly louder volumes, until my uncle Doug finally grabbed her by the arm, led her to the bench, and literally told her to bend her knees. She seemed surprised when her ass touched the bench.

Per regulation, she was read her Miranda rights one more time. "Okay, are you willing to talk to me about drinking tonight?"

"I guess so, offsher." Tina's head bobbled on her neck, unable to remain erect.

"Sign this please." Tina Troll signed.

Twenty minutes of questions followed. "What time do you think it is, Tina?"

Tina slammed her head against the stone walls in thought, trying to rattle her brain into action. "I guess like 3:30... I guess."

"How much did you have to drink tonight?"

At this, Tina could only answer in uncontrolled sobs. "I was jusht two block away, offsher. Two fucking blocks, oh God!" Her beady black eyes crumpled in tears. Her mascara patches had spread to the corners of her lips.

"Fucking God? Fucking Democrats, more like it," I muttered. I had not slept for nearly twenty-four hours, and I figured we had another hour of paper work to do on Tina.

Nearly two and a half hours after we had arrested her, Tina was finally allowed to take the official breathalyzer test that would be used at her trial. Putting a small white tube into her mouth, Tina blew as hard as she could... and then stopped, citing a shortness of breath. Failing the test twice, Tina finally was able to give a reasonable result, and measured in at a .107. In all the time it had taken to process her arrest, Tina's body had managed to eliminate nearly a third of the alcohol in her system.

"Okay Tina, right now I'm going to go ahead and put you in a holding cell." Tina followed his lead like a mule following a carrot. Opening a thick door on a nearby cell, my uncle Doug put Tina in a closet-sized room, and swiftly closed the door.

"Did you have to do that?" I asked.

"Not really. I was just tired of looking at her."

"So, in other words, you got rid of her for the same reason that dogs lick their balls."

"Why's that?"

"Because they can."

"Come on, Shrek. Let's go upstairs. We've got to get the guys to sign the transfer of custody." My uncle Doug put enough papers under his arm to cause me to sigh.

"It's not too late to gas her, you know."

"Let's go, BC."

"Seriously, if we just put a bucket of Windex and bleach in there with her, we can just leave. Problem solved."

"Come on."

"Okay, but I get to fly-kick the next person we handcuff in the back."

The hallway was constructed much like the entrance. No two adjacent doors could be opened at the same time. A perfect pocket of what I thought of as "imprisonment" followed us wherever we went. Ascending three flights of stairs brought us to the control center of the jail. Upon entering, we were greeted with cries of "Farva!" After that, two of the guards expressed concerns about any tornadoes that might hit the town, as the police station my uncle Doug worked at was a trailer. Another guard offered to purchase him a flamingo, if he would like.

As my uncle Doug silently began the paperwork necessary to transfer the custody of his prisoner, the three guards exchanged stories with him. "Jesus fucking Christ, Dougie. You should've seen the tits on this girl that came in yesterday. She was visiting her boyfriend. What was her name, Chris?"

"Harmony," another guard supplied. "Harmony Gebb." I bolted upright, for the first time completely forgetting to jot notes in my notepad.

"God yes, I would love to fuck the shit out of that piece of ass." I looked at my uncle Doug in shock. He shrugged in reply.

"That's my stepsister," I announced. Or at least she had been. An add-on from my father's fourth marriage. Finally, the three guards acknowledged my existence.

"Well Jesus, kid. Don't be so offended. She's your stepsister. Step. See?"

"Yeah, there ain't no blood. Did you hit that shit?" another guard asked.

Flustered, I looked back and forth from each of the guards. "What? No! She's my fucking stepsister."

"Chill out, dude."

"Yeah, calm down."

"Your sister has got nice tits. It could be worse."

"Yeah, we could be talking about my stepsister's tits."

Finally, I gave over to sighing a lot every time Harmony was brought up in conversation, and the guard switched to teasing my uncle Doug for looking like Farva and working out of a trailer. Suddenly incentivized to finish his work, the guards begrudgingly filled out his form and walked us out of the prison.

Descending three flights of stairs, and carrying our pocket of imprisonment down the hallway with us, we stopped by the holding cell we had left Tina in. There was a rumbling sound, like wind driven through a hollow cave by the tides. It shook the door. It shook the stone of the room itself.

"Jesus Christ," I whispered, placing my head against a nearby wall, feeling the vibrations. They were like the bellows blows in a medieval smithy. "That fucking troll is snoring."